C-SPAN and Campaign Finance Reform Have Ruined America
I made many mistakes as a teenager. For starters, I’m embarrassed to think that my friends and I threw eggs at cars driving along the highway. I also regret that I never attempted to play a team sport in high school. Perhaps my biggest mistake was obsessing over a woman who had no romantic interest in me while, at the same time, ignoring those women who did like me. Then there is the topic of this newsletter. In retrospect, I was wrong to support the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001 (S.27) and wrong to love C-SPAN. Now, when I consider the modern mess that is the American political system, I blame a lot of what is wrong on these two things.
In terms of C-SPAN, there are legitimate reasons for wanting cameras in the House and Senate. Without transparency, we get corruption. But, as Yuval Levin writes in National Review, “There has to be some balance struck between privacy for the sake of bargaining and transparency for the sake of accountability.” Personally, I prefer a balance that has reporters in the committee hearing rooms and in the House and Senate chambers but has the cameras completely out of there.
From the printing press to the internet, changes in modes of communication have impacted society and politics. As Purdue University history professor Kathryn Cramer Brownell observes, presidents in the early and mid-20th century utilized radio and television to “elevate the presidency in the public eye” and “carve out a more prominent role for the president in the legislative process.” Franklin D. Roosevelt famously used the radio to conduct “fireside chats.” Television helped turn the constitutionally mandated “Annual Message” into a national event we now call the State of the Union Address, as Harry Truman gave the first televised speech and Lyndon B. Johnson gave the first to a primetime audience. Meanwhile, the telegenic John F. Kennedy was adept at making the most of the camera. According to Brownell, President Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Johnson each “formed close friendships with television executives and relied on them for advice on how best to utilize the new communications medium.” All of this worried Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who argued in 1970 that “television, because of its peculiar capacity and power, threatens to destroy the traditional constitutional balance.” So it was natural for representatives and senators to want to heighten their own profile in the public eye by televising Congressional hearings. This proved particularly true about the Watergate hearings, which were streamed live to the country from start to finish.
After Watergate, Congress studied how to televise more of its operations. In 1974, a Joint Committee held hearings on the topic and then issued a report recommending the broadcast of floor proceedings, because it would “bring meaningful information more directly to more of our citizens.” Then, in 1979, C-SPAN began televising live all floor activity in the House of Representatives. Soon C-SPAN televised committee hearings as well. Al Gore was the first representative to appear on the new channel. He delivered a hopeful speech about how C-SPAN could expose political misconduct. Gore predicted that “television will change this institution just as it has changed the executive branch” and the “good will outweigh the bad because the solution for the lack of confidence in government is more open government at all levels.”
Then Newt Gingrich arrived on the scene. He and his allies made use of a rule allowing representatives to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These “special orders” had long been a means by which individuals could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents. But, as David Graham observes in The Atlantic, Gingrich, thinking of the potential television audience, used special orders to attack the Democratic majority. Gingrich estimated that hundreds of thousands of could be watching, and it didn’t matter that the House chamber was empty.
Fed up with the vitriolic speeches that junior Republicans were delivering at the end of the day, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill ordered C-SPAN to have the cameras pan the room, showing viewers the empty seats. O’Neill thought this would help explain why Democrats were not responding to the allegations made against them. When Gingrich and O’Neill got into a heated back and forth, Brian Lamb, who founded C-SPAN, called the incident a “terrific boost for the whole concept of C-SPAN because it got people talking across the country about Congress and cable television.
Not everyone thought the cameras were a net positive. Irving Kristol, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of The Public Interest, a dense journal of public policy, argued in a New York Times op-ed that the cameras and the focus on transparency “penalizes compromise and rewards aggressive grandstanding.” He wrote, “Does anyone really believe that the Ford Motor Company and the United Automobile Workers could have reached an agreement if their negotiations were transmitted live on television? The only reason Congress can function is because the committee system provides private (i.e., “secret”) occasions for negotiation that are distinct from the public forum where opinions are sharply expressed and debated.”
Nearly fifty years after Kristol predicted Congressional dysfunction, Yuval Levin, another public intellectual who also works at AEI and is also an editor of a quarterly public policy journal, National Affairs, has made similar observations about the dangers of television. But Levin extends the analysis with interesting observations about the nature of modern political incentives. According to Levin, “Congress suffers from a malady the framers never quite imagined: a shortage of ambition.” James Madison predicted in Federalist 48 that Congress would always be “extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex,” but Levin observes that “ambition is now channeled away from the institution of Congress as a legislative body and is redirected along two related paths.”
The first relates to partisanship, as “members of Congress have grown more inclined to see themselves as belonging to a team that extends beyond Congress.” As a result, they are less likely to flex legislative power on behalf of Congress and are more likely to side with a powerful presidency and diminished Congress if it means “a win for their political tribe.” But the bigger issue, Levin writes, is that “many members of Congress have come to see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” They increasingly view the institution of Congress as an “effective platform for themselves—a way to raise their profile, to become celebrities in the world of cable news or talk radio, whether locally or nationally, to build a bigger social-media following, and in essence to become stars.”
C-SPAN has turned the deliberative spaces into become performative spaces. As everything has become televised, there is less ability for legislatures to talk in private. This matters, Levin argues, because “the kind of frank negotiation that would need to happen if a legislative deal is ever to take shape depends upon some degree of privacy and even secrecy.” Consider how the U.S. Constitution was made. As Levin observes in The Atlantic, “By retreating to a private space to deliberate, the convention’s members were able to try out ideas, let proposals be floated, and avoid embarrassing one another in public or using one another as props.”
Levin argues that it is in the committee system is where televised transparency has done real damage, and those few committees that function behind closed doors help prove the point. Many members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for instance, describe their work as their favorite part of their job. According to Levin, “In the absence of the pressure to act out stylized cultural combat, they find real pleasure in doing the work of legislators— they talk to one another, learn together, find shared priorities, and reach agreements.” But when the cameras are turned on, too many politicians focus on producing YouTube clips to help with fundraising, which gets me to a second and final topic of this newsletter: the pernicious effect of campaign finance reform. Just as I was wrong about C-SPAN, I didn’t understand how McCain-Feingold would destroy political parties and lead to a world in which we end up with Donald Trump as president.
After Watergate, Congress passed the Federal Campaign Act of 1974 (H.R.16090). There are two key things to know about this legislation. First, a new breakdown developed between “hard money”—donations directly made to a candidate’s campaign—and “soft money”—funding collected by political parties for “party strengthening.” The second thing to know is that, while the law sought to diminish the influence of wealthy individuals by limiting the amount of money they could contribute directly to candidates (i.e. hard money), the law 1) increased the time that members had to spend raising money, since it now took many more individual contributors to get the same amount of money and 2) the law gave wealthy citizens an incentive to get their political contributions into the system via soft money donations. As a result, over the next few decades, people became concerned with the unlimited and unaccountable donations directed to national political parties (i.e. soft money).
This leads us to the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001, which is more commonly known as McCain-Feingold. The reformers banned soft money donations to the parties. Proponents said the law would restore trust in the political system. They said parties would “thrive” because they would be forced to rely on small donors. Back as a senior in high school, I agreed with this argument. I was wrong.
As Robert Kelner and Raymond La Raja write in a Washington Post op-ed from 2014, the ban on soft money donations to political parties led to shift of political power away from the parties and toward outside groups (e.g. “Moveon.org” or “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”), which were likely to be far more extreme and far less accountable. Duke professor Michael Munger writes of these “shadow parties,” short-lived organizations would only focus on a particular issue or a particular election. He and others argue that we are better served by a U.S. political system in which partisan organizing takes place through the parties rather than through Super PACs, 527s, and other outside groups. Munger points out that unlike parties, which are more permanent fixtures in American political culture, “independent groups can make unfounded claims and accusations and then simply fold up and then show up with another name in another election.” Indeed, political parties used to perform an important anti-democratic function, as party bosses would groom good candidates and weed out bad ones. As Jonah Goldberg observes in the L.A. Times, it is perhaps the central irony of our politics today: We live in an incredibly polarized and partisan moment, but our political parties have never been weaker. It’s a world where a lifelong Democrat in Donald Trump can waltz in and highjack a Republican party.
While it’s a problem I only saw in retrospect, there were plenty of skeptics who predicted that McCain-Feingold would not take any money out of politics, but it would take the parties out of politics. Consider this prescient quote from Senator Mitch McConnell in 2001: “If special interests cannot give to parties, they will use their money to influence elections in other ways. [They will] place unlimited, unregulated and undisclosed issue advertisements; mount their own get-out-the-vote efforts; form their own action groups. Unrestrained by the balancing effect of parties, which bring multiple interests together, America's politics are likely to fragment. `Shadowy groups with innocuous-sounding names will hold potentially enormous sway….Do we really want the two-party system weakened in favor of greater power for wealthy candidates and single-issue group?”
As a metaphor for the topic of campaign financing, I think of a discussion I had with Rabbi Shlomo, who runs a synagogue in Charlottesville. Because he relies on a few very large donations, he can spend less time fundraising and more time doing the work of actually being a rabbi. Further, he isn’t “corrupted” by the desires of the big donors. Instead, they donate to him because of his views and of the work he conducts in the community. So those inclined to fear the corruptive influence of allowing elected officials to just rely on a few large donors instead of many small donors forget the fact that donors tend to give to candidates based on their publicly held positions.
In closing, the problems of C-SPAN and the BCFRA are interrelated in this sense. The more that candidates rely on small donors, the more they perform for the cameras. America would do well to have a few less cameras coupled with a few more smoked filled rooms.